What are top SEO strategies in 2016?

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Written by Yana Makhanov

To this day search engine optimization is a controversial topic for many online affiliates and website owners. On one hand there are rules to follow set by google team of intelligent minds, on the other hand there still are plenty of scammy, banner-farm websites all over the first pages in search results. Confusing isn’t it?

SEO is complex, or so the intelligent minds want us to think. And since many of us are completely clueless after all of the google animal-update-attack, I have decided to write down some of the top advices of 2015 you can find online these days straight from the internet intellectuals:

Use google webmaster tools

Listen! Google webmaster tools are free compared to other search engine websites and software that promise you top ranking and ability to spy on your so-called competition. Google webmaster tools won’t let you “spy”, but it gives you enough data to analyze your website performance and fix the errors and issues.

Another reason to use the webmaster tools is because it has been designed by google and there are over 1.17 billion users who search via google. That is a number of people I cannot even picture in my mind!

Write good quality content

Readers want attractive, informative, funny at times articles and they will stay on your site if you provide just that. If your site is thin on useful articles, your traffic will float through your fingers to your competition, no matter how hard you spy on them!

Duplicate content won’t get you far neither in google ranking nor in your visitors attention. Write from your heart or hire someone good to write for site. Copying someone else ideas will only hurt one way or another.

The website needs to include the social sharing options so that your quality content can reach users via facebook, twitter and other social networks.

Solve the crawling errors

Crawling mistakes, server errors and other issues listed in google webmaster tools need to be addressed with upmost attention. The website that cannot be crawled properly will not get extra points with google judges! Most of the errors can be found in blocked robots.txt files, sitemaps, server errors and inaccessible pages.

It’s not just about keywords anymore

Google search engine algorithm has changed greatly since two and three word keywords were in fashion. Now you have to think longer sentences and not just two, three words that define your overall content of the site.

For example, if we talk about “Top Forex Brokers”, you might want to concentrate on the whole phrase “What is the top forex broker in 2015” because this is what users ask these days. Apparently the two, three word searches have been replaced with actual full-sentenced questions these days according to Matt Cutt (who has been recently replaced with a still unknown-to-public figure as a head of web spam in Google company).

Tasteful link building is better than endless links

Here is some food for thought - “do not create an idol”. And if link building has been your idol in the past, it is time to ditch it and ditch it fast. What happens to sites that have thousands of links created in a day? It might rank on the first page for couple of weeks but then drops out of sight forever.

On top of quality links, your anchor text linking to your website should appear more natural and less “keyword concentrated”.

Optimize your website for mobile devices

This isn’t a new idea, but many website owners still didn’t optimize their site for mobile devices and tablets. When everywhere you look there are people with smartphones and tablets, not optimizing your site is like shooting yourself in the foot before a running race.

Conclusion

With all that being said, there is honestly no black and white in the optimization field. Google continue to roll out updates of it algorithm as often as twice a month, leaving us, poor peasants to general speculation and piles of hypothetical practices.